When I’m depressed, I read Caeiro — he’s my fresh air. I become very calm, content, faithful — yes, I find faith in God, and in the soul’s transcendent living smallness, after reading the poems...

His conception of the universe is, however, instinctive, not intellectual; it can’t be criticized as a concept, because there’s none there, and it can’t be criticized as temperament, because temperament can’t be criticized.

It’s the poet we love in Caeiro, not the philosopher. What we really get from these poems is a childlike sense of life, with all the direct materiality of the child’s mind, and all the...

he woman Caeiro fell in love with. I have no idea who she was, and I intend to never find out, not even out of curiosity. There are things of which the soul refuses to...

Nothing: a landscape, a glass of wine, a little loveless love, and the vague sadness caused by our understanding nothing and having lost the little we’re given.

the Great Vaccination — the vaccination against the stupidity of the intelligentsia.

No, I’m at peace.” It was like the voice of the earth, which is everything and no one.

and the idea of nothingness — the most terrifying of all ideas, when thought of with feeling — has, in my dear master’s work and in my memories of him, something as high and luminous...

in exceptional circumstances — exceptional in that all circumstances in life are exceptional, especially those which are nothing in themselves and come to be everything in their results.

It’s stupid, but it’s human, and that’s how it is.

The Amorous Shepherd is a fruitless interlude, but those few poems are among the world’s greatest love poems, because they’re love poems about love, not about being poems. The poet loves because he loves, not...

Que grande vantagem o recordar intrasigentemente!Agora tenho pena de nunca mais ter visto a outra raparigaE tenho pena de nem sequer ter olhado para esta(…)Porque todas as recordações são a mesma recordação,Tudo o que foi...

A shadow is real, but it’s less real than a rock. A dream is real — if it weren’t, it wouldn’t be a dream — but less real than a thing. That’s what being real...

Tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo

What is 34 in Reality, anyway?

He possesses the minimum sensibility necessary for his intelligence not to be merely mathematical, the minimum a human being needs so that it can be proven with a thermometer that he’s not dead.

Why?” asked my master Caeiro.

Superior poets say what they really feel. Mediocre poets say what they decide to feel. Inferior poets say what they think they should feel.